Book 38  The World is A Town.
Penn, C. (2009) (Fig.37). Unique artist’s book.  57 handmade paper pages, wax, wood, paint, text, digital prints, collage, sewing, drawing. 35cm x 60cm long  x 32cm.  Book 38. Collection: Cheryl Penn

The title of this work is taken from  a translated, appropriated  part of the Novgorod Codex used in this work, some of which read reads;

The world is a town in which heretics are excluded from the church.
The world is a town in which unwise people are excluded from the church.
The world is a town in which disobedient people are excluded from the church.
The world is a town in which blameless people are excluded from the church.
The Novgorod Codex,  dating back to the first quarter of the 11th century, “is the only whole medieval object of its type from the entire Slavonic  world, and one of the very few from Europe as a whole” (Zalizniak, 2002).  It  is considered to be  the oldest book of Rus.  The codex consists of three wooden tablets containing four pages filled with wax on which its owner wrote numerous  texts during two or three decades, each time wiping out the proceeding text. 
I wanted to make use of the original text, alter it, and present it as a sculptural piece which resembles a  bridge; the use of the bridge making reference to the connection of thought from an 11th century writer to the postmodernist thinker; both of whom reference the concepts of  globalization, exclusion, and recognition of the ‘other’. The idea for the bridge book came from the American artist Dolph Smith who having a “weakness for clichés.. made [various] books which had to do with ‘water under the bridge’” (Smith in LaFerla, 164: 2004).
I used the original text and waxed each handmade page as a reference to  the original.  The binding of the pages, handmade  from recycled rag board, holds the pages to the two book ends in the form of a rope bridge.  The book end blocks are covered in a digital copy of the original text from the wax tablets, while the pages give the English translation.  As a book, this work is difficult to read and handle, echoing the complexities of the original Novgorod Codex.